Created by M.J. Trow
MATTHEW GRAND, formerly of the U.S. Army (he was a witness to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination), and JAMES BATCHELOR, an ex-journalist, are a pair of private enquiry agents in Victorian London, in a series of historical thrillers by M.J. Trow that mix (not always successfully) light-hearted hijinks with some pretty gruesome murders and some pretty impressive cameos featuring historical figures.
The period detail and atmospheric rendering of the era, on both sides of the Atlantic, however, is always topnotch, and American readers should get a kick out of The Circle (2016), which finds the two journeying to Washington, D.C. in the aftermath of the Civil War to investigate the murder of the head of the US National Detective Police, and coming up against the newly formed Ku Klux Klan.
Grand and Batchelor do get around, that’s for sure. In The Angel (2016), they’re hired to look into the suspicious death of Charles Dickens, and in The Island (2017), set off the coast of Maine, Mark Twain pops up.
According to his Amazon bio, the author is a military historian by training and the author of the long-running Inspector Lestrade and ‘Mad Max’ Maxwell detective series, as well as the Kit Marlowe Tudor mystery series. He lives on the Isle of Wight.
NOVELS
- The Blue and the Grey (2015) | Buy this book | Buy the audio | Kindle it!
- The Circle (2016) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
- The Angel (2016) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
- The Island (2018) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
- The Ring (2019) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
